“We’ll be careful. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Chief.”

Jack hit the disconnect button with a chuckle. Apparently Greylen wasn’t acknowledging they were on a first-name basis. But if Jack was going to run the MacKeage gauntlet, he would do it as an equal. Highlanders had nothing on Cree warriors.

“Was my father very mad?” Megan asked, emerging from the bushes, a bit winded and pink faced.

“Would you be worried if he was?”

“No,” she said with a laugh. “He’s all bluster. At least with us girls,” she clarified. “I’ve decided to come back up here tomorrow or the next day. If I can document a mountain lion in the area, it will shut down the study before it’s even begun.”

“And you’ll be out of a job.”

“That’s the way this business goes.”

“Megan, did you notice anything…oh, I don’t know, anything strange when we were on the tundra? Did you see any sign that there might be oil under that section?”

“Oil? You mean like bubbling tar pits that swallow up woolly mammoths and sabertooth tigers?”

Jack shook his head seriously. “I’ve been thinking about Mark Collins’s connection to Billy Wellington, Billy’s connection to your study, and your connection to Collins by way of this job. Honestly, don’t you find it odd that the common factor here is Collins?”

“It’s what he does, Jack. Mark is in the consulting business, and he hires biologists for studies all over the world. Why are you so convinced there’s something fishy going on?”

“Because a man was murdered.”

She sat down on her sled and looked up at him. “Okay, just for the sake of argument, let’s say Mark was involved in that man’s death. What has it got to do with me?”

Jack sat down on his own sled, which was parked beside hers. “This is just a theory. Call it a hunch if you want, but I think Collins was hired by someone—an energy company, maybe—to make sure your study didn’t expose the fact that there’s oil or natural gas under that area of tundra. So Collins put Billy Wellington on the study to keep an eye on things.”

“But that implies Billy might have killed that man.”

Jack shook his head. “There would be too much money involved to trust something like that to a kid. And Billy was really shaken by that guy’s death. I think he told Collins that the government worker had discovered something, and Collins sent someone more experienced to deal with the problem.”

“That still doesn’t connect anything to me.”

“Unless you discovered the same thing the government worker did.”

“But what? I didn’t see anything that pointed to oil.”

“What about that dead arctic fox you found, and those half-eaten ptarmigans? Did you ever find out what killed them?”

“No. I took DNA samples, but I gave the carcasses to—” Her eyes widened. “To the government worker! He was supposed to send them to Ottawa.” She stood up. “And remember that dead snowy owl I found three days earlier? I gave him that carcass, too.”

“Did he send them out?”

“No. He was waiting for the supply plane to arrive.” She sat down again, stunned. “My God, do you think those dead animals are the link?” she whispered. “Could that man have been killed because of what had killed them?”

Jack took her hands in his. “It’s a good possibility, if those birds ingested oil, and the fox and owl ate them and also died. It’s also possible that Collins wants those DNA samples you took.”

“But why wait four months to try to get them from me?”

“You’ve been surrounded by a small army since you’ve been home, and Gù Brath is a veritable fortress. I suspect Collins did send someone to Pine Creek, but when he realized he wasn’t going to get your samples by stealing them, he decided to simply hire you to get close enough to find them.”

“I—I suppose that makes sense. Except that I found the job on the Internet. How could he know I’d even be looking?”

“I suspect the job was posted just to make it look legitimate. Chances are if you hadn’t seen it, you would have gotten a letter from Collins soon. Then, when you checked it out, you would have believed him because the job had been posted long before he contacted you.”

She pulled her hands free and stood up. “Then we need to get going. I want to get home and find those samples.”

“Where are they?”

“In my mother’s lab. I stashed my trunk there when I came home, and forgot about it.”

Jack felt like he was finally making progress. He kicked snow on the fire to put out the last of the dying embers. “First thing tomorrow, you find those samples and bring them to me at the police station.”

“But they need to go to a lab.”

“I’ll get them to one.” He strapped the basket on the back of her sled, then looked around to make sure they had everything. “I have connections in the Canadian government. This isn’t an academic problem, Megan. It’s a government one.”

Jack would swear he heard her mutter something about a nerd as she climbed onto her sled and pulled on her helmet.

“Wait!” he shouted as she reached to start her engine. “Which trail are we taking back?”

She flipped up her visor, then pointed west toward the lake. “The one we’re on should continue to the ITS trail that runs down the east side of Pine Lake.”

“Are you sure, or just pretty sure?”

She just flipped down her visor, started her sled, and shot off down the trail. Jack waited until the snow dust had settled enough for him to see, then followed.

It was dark by the time they broke out of the forest and onto the lake—not the ITS trail. Jack’s gut tightened; he did not want to travel the lake in the dark. He pulled up beside Megan, who had stopped and shut off her sled.

“I have no idea where the ITS trail is,” she told him. “I don’t know how we could have missed it.”

Jack unzipped his tank bag and dug out his map. “We’re going to have to find it, because we’re not traveling the lake at night.”

“I bet we’re just a few miles north of where we should be, and I’m pretty sure there’s a club trail that runs the length of the lake,” she offered. “We just have to find it, follow it south until we pick up the ITS trail, and we’ll have a straight shot home.”

Jack walked to the front of his sled, bent down in the beam of the headlight, and studied the map. “It’s a lot more than a few miles to the ITS trail,” he told her when she walked up beside him. “More like ten or twelve. See,” he said, pointing out where they were. “This trail brought us out here, and the ITS takes a sharp eastern turn way down there.”

He stepped back for the headlights to illuminate the area in front of them, and saw sled marks splaying out in all directions. “We should go back the way we came.”

“But that will take all night.”

“It’s better than taking a cold swim.” He folded the map and turned her to face him. “I don’t like traveling on ice at night.”

“We’ll be on the club trail, for crying out loud. The local club will have marked it with small trees. They check it almost daily and set it well away from any dangerous spots. I vote we take the lake. Ten measly miles, Jack. And we’ve had subfreezing temperatures for nearly two months.” She reached out and laid her hand on his chest. “Are you forgetting that I grew up here? I know this lake like the back of my hand.”

He didn’t point out that she’d gotten them lost twice today, since he suddenly realized this conversation was no longer about getting home. It was a test to see if he was capable of trusting her. And how could he persuade her to trust him again if he didn’t do the same?

Dammit to hell. “Okay,” he growled. “We’ll take the lake. But I lead.”

Her grin slashed broad in the headlights. Megan patted his chest and practically skipped back to her sled. “Not a problem, Jack. Better your taking a cold swim than me. Don’t worry, I’ll throw you a rope if you fall through the ice.”

Jack climbed on his sled, headed toward the well-marked trail a couple of hundred yards out from shore, and set a comfortable pace down the lake. Megan stayed behind him for exactly ten minutes. Then she pulled up beside him and matched his pace for about a mile, gave him a cheerful wave, and zoomed ahead.